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Friday, April 01, 2016

Really, this is just a plug for an article over at The Arkansas Times, recording the death of Fred Arnold. The story starts as an everyday tragedy - homeless man becomes the 467th person to die in a car accident in the state in 2015 - but becomes much more:

[His friend Walter Durst] said that Arnold, who often went by the nickname Billy, had once owned a set of iconic record stores in Charleston, S.C., where he had also been a radio show host and an active promoter of punk bands in the 1980s. He said he'd visited London, Cuba and Russia (that his politics "bordered on Communist") and had also briefly lived in Colorado, as he preferred a colder climate. He said that Arnold had suffered a number of strokes in recent years, exacerbating many of his other problems. The letter, though, grew stranger as it went on. Durst claimed, for instance, that Arnold had known all the members of The Beatles, and had been particularly good friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. That after Lennon's death, Arnold and Ono had continued to correspond and had remained close friends. "It was one of the hardest things I have ever done," he wrote, "when I had to write to Yoko to tell her of Fred's death."